


Empty Playground

by kanzfrafka



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25729330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanzfrafka/pseuds/kanzfrafka
Summary: Statement of Aisha Ali, regarding her friendship with one Katherine Lukas during their shared attendance at Queensbridge Secondary School, Birmingham. Recorded direct from subject, July 9th, 2017. Statement begins.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 25





	Empty Playground

Again?

_ Sorry. Technical issues. Is it a problem? _

I need to be in Birmingham before my mum figures out I’m skiving.

_ You skipped school to make your statement? And came all the way here from Birmingham? _

Are you gonna tell my mum?

_ No. No, I suppose not. _

Then… yeah. I did.

_...Alright. Well, it won’t take us any later than 12:30, and the station’s a short bus ride away. Are you ready? _

Yeah, I’m ready.

_ Statement of Aisha Ali, regarding her friendship with one Katherine Lukas during their shared attendance at Queensbridge Secondary School, Birmingham. Recorded direct from subject, July 9th, 2017. Statement begins. _

I’ve never been great at sticking up for myself. Talking in general, really - I never know what words to say so I end up leaving myself in this empty silence where whatever thoughts I have are either dismissed as awkward or just… never considered as a conversation topic. But me and my friend Alice Carter always managed. I could let myself say dumb shit to her. It was nice.

For the record, Alice and I were friends well before Katie showed up. Best friends. We never needed anyone else. Birthday parties were us two going bowling together and our designated corner of the school playground was firmly occupied territory. Our friend group was exclusive. When we were eleven and we both got into the same secondary school, we screamed until we got yelled at. 

All this to say, Alice was  _ my _ friend. But Katie Lukas was hers. 

She only started hanging out with Katie in Year 7 because Mrs Hussain sat them together in French. I guess that was when they must have got talking, because she sat with us at lunch. You know those people who make you feel… important, just talking to you? I think Katie must have been one of those people. I say I think because she never really said more than a handful of words to me, total - she made pleasantries, sure, but the moment she and Alice started talking, neither of them stopped for the whole hour. Neither spared a glance at me. If Katie could make you feel important by talking to you, then ignoring me felt like a kick in the ribs. And that was how lunch went every day for… pretty much the rest of the school year. Looking back, maybe it was dumb that I didn’t find new friends, but you have to understand, Alice was  _ my _ friend. I wasn’t giving her up that easily, not for Katie _ , _ not for anyone. So I stayed. I sat with her every break and every lunch and listened to my best friend in the world talk endlessly about nothing I could ever understand with Katie  _ fucking  _ Lukas. It was normal shit, I guess, but none of it was ever anything I understood. It would always be a celebrity I had barely heard of or a class I didn’t take, or, maybe worst of all, a trip they’d taken without me. Once I tried to meet them halfway - they’d been going on about the new Captain America film, so I went to see it with my mum. They never mentioned it again. When I told them I had seen it, Katie shrugged me off, said it wasn’t that great. She had a point, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was on purpose. At the time, I brushed off the thought, but now I’m not so sure. 

To Alice’s credit, she made an attempt for me. It was around Katie’s birthday, and they were talking about their special sleepover plans. She must have noticed that talking about them right in front of me was kind of a dick move because she said “Aisha can come too, right?” and I guess Katie was too polite to say no. I would like to say that I didn’t want their pity invite but… I really did. If there was an opportunity to be included, I wanted it. So I went. 

It was just the three of us at her house. It was a really nice place. It had never occurred to me that Katie’s family was loaded, but it made sense - she had that Kings Heath upper-middle-class snobbery to her. The place was tall and Victorian and clean. Really clean. No scuffs, no signs of life, like an Ikea catalogue. I wondered if her parents were just neat freaks, but I quickly realised I had no way of proving that theory, as they were nowhere in sight. When Alice mentioned it Katie very firmly said they were out and changed the subject.

The night panned out pretty much like it always did with them, the two of them talking and leaving me to sit there nursing a bowl of crisps and staring at all of Katie’s stuff. Not that there was much to stare at. Her room was all grey and white and soft edges. No books. Empty shelves. Couple clothes, though. I remember it was colder than the rest of the place, though she didn’t have a fan or anything - the windows weren’t even open. Drafty. Weird airflow. Or at least, I thought that was it.

By the time the bowl of crisps was empty I’d come to terms with the fact that if I left, nobody would notice. Katie and Alice would keep talking, and I would just… slip under their radar. I was close to actually going through with it when Alice hunched over, clutching her stomach. On reflex, I grabbed the empty bowl of crisps and handed it to her just in time for her to vomit into it.

“Aisha,” she said, her voice fragile and small, “Call my dad?”

I got her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and got her dad on the phone as quickly as I could, rubbing her back as we talked. Katie looked very clearly out of her depth with this, and a little bit grossed out, but he turned up and drove Alice home in a matter of minutes, and that was just about that. Me and Katie were alone in her massive house. Neither of us knew what to say, really. We’d never been alone together before. Eventually, I just said, “Guess I should clean out your crisp bowl!”

As I was scooping my friend’s vomit into Katie’s bin and she was very deliberately keeping her distance, I did consider leaving too. It felt weird without Alice. But even after all she’d done to take her away from me, I did want Katie to like me. I don’t like not being liked. And if this was an opportunity to talk to her, then I wasn’t looking that gift horse in the mouth. I just wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Turns out I needn’t have worried. Katie was actually kind of… not nice to me, really, but polite. There was cake - a homemade one, from the looks of it, decorated somewhat messily to look like a whale. I don’t know why the whale thing surprised me, but Katie clearly picked up on it because she got on the defensive.

“I like whales, okay?” I remember her saying, “I’m a whale person.”

I said, “okay,” and we ate. Despite the amateur decorating, it actually tasted really good. Lemon flavour. I mean, lemon icing dyed blue is a strange thing to taste, but not actually a bad one. We had one slice each, and then Katie actually asked if I wanted to put on a film and split the rest. I asked if her parents would mind and she chuckled to herself, almost…  _ sadly _ . And then she put on the film. I couldn’t imagine eating half a cake now, but even in such weird company, it was too much of a novelty back then to matter. By the end of the film, we were both asleep, the cake demolished on her coffee table. I hadn’t even gotten into my pyjamas. 

I woke up late the next morning with frosting on my hijab. Katie was eating toast when I found her in the kitchen. She said good morning, pointed me in the direction of her toaster, and asked when I was heading home, which to my ears sounded a lot like “please leave”. So I did, as soon as I was ready. After all, considering she didn’t really like me all that much, she had actually been an alright host.

I don’t know if they worked like this in your day, but do you remember the way school halls feel at the end of an exam? Not the relief. The quiet. The way talking, at that point, isn’t gonna do anyone any damage, but the silence feels unbreakable. Sacred, almost. That was how it felt to step out of Katie’s house. It was May, it had been getting warmer, but all of a sudden there was a chill in the air. It was getting foggy too, like I had never seen it before. The very sound of my breathing felt like a disturbance.

That was when it started getting weird.

A group of people passed me by. I didn’t even notice for a second, but they weren’t people, not really. They were shapes. Like they were part of the fog. No faces, no distinguishing features, just empty, shapeless bodies. More and more people passed me and they  _ all  _ looked like that. Like all the life in them was gone. Like none of them were... _real,_ even right there in the flesh. I thought maybe the world had ended and I was the only real person left, and to be honest, that’s still a theory, if a weird one.

I kept walking. I mean, what was I meant to do? I walked through the fog and the cold and the people that were nothing. And I did get home, and when I went inside, I did see my mum’s face, her smile lines and her long hair. I ran to her, tried to hug her, overwhelmed with relief. But she didn’t look at me. My arms slid right through her. She said something to my brother and his face was real too, but her voice just wasn’t there. I didn’t hear it, but he certainly replied. I just didn’t hear that either. Or anything they said. I wasn't _deaf_ , I heard my dad’s record player and my mum putting on the kettle and my own footsteps in this version of my house but their voices were just… nothing. And their eyes looked right through me even as I screamed into their faces. And I was so, so alone. 

I always liked those stories about ghosts where they keep going through the motions. My favourites were the ones where they relived their last moments, always in that cycle of dying over and over. I never really got them, though, not until then. Because when it came to it, when I found myself haunting my own house, I did what I always did. I sat in my room. I tried to open my laptop but my fingers fell through it. I went to the park and watched shapeless people kick footballs around. I even went to bed at night and went to school in the morning. I fell back into routine. I lost track of time.

School was more of the same. Half-shapen people I knew of but never knew, lessons I never heard a word of, my few sort-of-friends looking straight through me. And then there was Katie. I saw her at lunch, opaque as anything, larger than life. I couldn’t hear her voice as she and Alice talked, but when Alice wasn’t looking, she looked straight into my eyes. I don’t think she ever properly looked me in the eyes until then. They were pale and calculating, and she was smiling. And then she went back to talking with Alice. I didn’t know what this place was, but I knew then that I was here because of Katie, and I  _ hated _ her for it. But I stayed with her in school. The alternative was an empty playground of half-formed people.

I thought about Alice a lot in that place. I thought about how she was doing, now that I was gone, spending every day at our table without me. I thought about how happy she must have been. She looked happy, though I never heard her speak. And why wouldn’t she be? I came to realise over the time I spent in that place that she never really liked me. Katie didn’t drive a wedge between us, she was just a catalyst.

I thought about Katie at least as much. Her pale, evil eyes. Her fake smile. The way she stepped into my life and sent ripples through it like a stone in a lonely pond. I wondered how I had pissed her off a lot, but like I said, we never even had a real conversation. Maybe she just didn’t like me. Maybe I just deserved what was coming to me.

That last party played in my head over and over too. I did a lot of thinking in there. I remembered Katie’s weird politeness, that stupid cake, the film, the toast, the crisps. I remembered when Alice was sick. I remembered grabbing her phone, calling her dad, and-

I remembered that I was the one she trusted to call her dad. I remembered that I knew her passcode, that I knew his name was in her phone as “Mr Stinky”, that I knew she was scared of heights and allergic to bee stings and her first crush was Sam from primary school and she used to collect hats but gave it up when she realised the nice ones were way too expensive for her pocket money and she was lethal at Cluedo and still didn’t know how to swim.

I remembered that nobody would ever know who I was like that, not even Alice.

I remembered that I was a good friend to her. That I loved her. That I would do anything - that  _ I did everything for her. _ Of course she knew me.

I remembered that didn’t matter though, did it, Aisha? Who was I to act like I was entitled to her? If I was such a good friend, why was I so easy to swap out? And why did I care? Basic kindness didn’t mean she owed me anything. 

I remembered that wasn’t true, necessarily. Basic kindness means she owes me basic kindness and basic kindness doesn’t ignore you. Basic kindness doesn’t feel like this. Basic kindness doesn’t hurt like a stone in your throat.

I remembered that I was just clingy.

I remembered that I was still worth something.

I remembered I wasn’t.

I remembered I was. I was worth the respect of parted ways. I was worth the respect of letting go. I was worth the respect of being told to fuck off when the alternative was to hang on for dear life even when the ship was submerged, capsized, sunken. I was worthy of new friends, and if they replaced me, rejected me, hurt me, I was worth the respect of cutting ties with them.

And then I remembered that the last time it had been this clear outside I was seeing Alice off in her dad’s car. 

The same car that was parked behind me as I faced Alice’s door and knocked.

It flew open and Alice flew out, pulling me into a tight, warm hug. Her hair was a mess and she was sobbing and I never wanted to let go. I wrapped my arms around her warm, solid shoulders as she cried and cried.

Yeah, I hugged back. I cried too. She was the first person I had seen in a month, as it turned out, so you’ll forgive me if my epiphany of self-respect didn’t immediately come into effect. It got there in time. Let’s just say we move in different circles now and leave it at that. We’re both… fine. I might even be better.

But I've been thinking on and off about it all since. That cold, foggy place. I don’t understand Katie Lukas. I don’t think I ever will, especially given she left our school without a goodbye or a warning. I don’t know why she was alone in that house, or how she broke apart the longest friendship I ever had, or why she was so nice to me only to do whatever it is she did. But I can’t exactly talk to her, and some stuff online said maybe you could help. I don’t want to tell my mum. Since I disappeared she’s been… on edge about me. Walking on eggshells. So, yeah, I skipped school to make my statement. And I had a really nice chat with an old lady on the way here. 

_ Statement ends. _

**Author's Note:**

> the beauty of how tma references real life places is that i'm completely allowed to make very specific references to very specific parts of my city that nobody from outside of birmingham will get


End file.
